Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

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> Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake.

So you are happy with "guilty until proven innocent" and "as he might be guilty, we can't give him the chance to prove otherwise because he might fool the legal system" as a moral precedents?

If there is evidence charge him and give him a fair trial, if there isn't admit so and let him go.

> but he most probably doesn't deserve nearly half the self-righteous indignation that everyone here is displaying.

You might be right, you might be wrong. But how will we ever know one way or the other without evidence presented? This is the sort of thing we in the west regularly chide other regimes for, and we are doing it ourselves making complete hypercrits of ourselves - this is why people who care about such things are getting rather indignant about the whole thing.

In times of war it is guilty until proven innocent, did you take a look at the UN link? Two powers who are "at War" can take anyone into custody that they think is "aid and abetting the enemy" and they do not have to release them until the war ends.

In times of war most civil liberties are suspended, we can discuss the fairness or "rightness" of that, but until we can all calm down and talk instead of hit that's the reality that we live in.

The same way a soldier gives his life to his country and with that signs away his freedom, the same way that war suddenly makes murder "legal", war gives a government body the "right" to take away what one would think are inalienable rights. I laugh at their indignation because they think they can pick and choose which parts of war to keep, but the reality is it's all or nothing and everything in between.

The USGov are not applying the POW rules to the Guantanamo prisoners otherwise they'd have more legal protections. That's why the Bushies had to dream up the "enemy combatant" legal limbo in order to be able to abuse the prisoners like this.

Even under "war rules" these prisoners should be dealt with in a better way.

And "Guilty until proven innocent?" Really? Idiot.

Even so Enemy combatant has a lot of the same laws as POWs.

It's possible they should be treated better but this guy is a known bodyguard of UBL[1] and has lied consistently to everyone [1] so it's not clear how he's being treated (remember this is a Oped about politics - anything goes).

I'll ignore the last line as you've said nothing of substance.

[1]http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/43-samir-na...

This individual is not the issue. Guantanamo Bay is the issue.

That facility is in use in order to circumvent the law in treatment of prisoners period. It was located in Cuba in order to not be on US soil, because the Bush administration thought that offshore abuse would be easier to get away with.

If you have been awake at all during the past 12 years you will have heard the news stories about prisoners being tortured/executed there.

Furthermore, you will have heard the news stories of many inmates there turning out to be completely innocent.

Finally, you will have heard of the "people sweeps" in Afghanistan and Pakistan in which local warlords sold off people arbitrarily as "terrorists" to US forces, who didn't know better (and didn't care).

These people have been bunged up in Guantanamo without a fair trail. A fair trial is the only way to determine if they actually are who you and the lying US military claim they are.

If the prisoners are "guilty" of being enemy soldiers, then yes they can rot in jail until the US withdraws from Afghanistan.

If they are innocent, they should be freed immediately and compensated.

If you can't fathom that the word of the US military (or any part of any government really) should not just be taken on trust, you should take a time-machine to Nazi Germany. You'll love it there.

To be a prisoner of war, rather than an enemy combatant, don't you have to be the soldier of a recognised state, rather than a terrorist organisation?

No, there are two categories.

There is a (A) regular prisoner, that the normal legal rules apply to, including for terrorists.

Then there is (B) prisoner-of-war, which is for if there is a state of war and said person is a soldier in an enemy state.

Anybody who does not fit into category (B) by default fits into category (A).

"Enemy combatant" is something the Bush Administration pulled out of their ass because they wanted to torture prisoners.

If they were following the rules instead of making up criminal shit like that, they'd have had to treat the AlQaeda suspects ("suspects" including innocent civilians turned in for bounties) as category (A) civilian prisoners and not torture them. That wouldn't have fit the Bushies' plan.

The plan was to torture the prisoners by water boarding and make them "confess" that Saddam Hussein was behind 911 - to manufacture a "reason" for the Bushies to attack Iraq. And the plan worked.

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